Flash sideways

This article is about the narrative technique. For an analysis of the season 6 afterlife, see Flash sideways world.

The flash sideways saw characters living out alternate scenarios.

Season 6 introduced a new narrative technique - the flash sideways. Like flashbacks and flash forwards, flash sideways intercut into episodes' main action a secondary storyline, which covered the centric characters at a different time. The series finale revealed the nature of the world the flash sideways portrayed: it showed the characters meeting after death. As such, the flash sideways are in a sense Flash-forwards.

Contents

Sound effect

The flash-sideways transition sound effect is characterized by a broken, stuttering version of the normal flash-forward/flashback sound, although slightly higher-pitched, almost resembling the sound coming from an airplane engine. It closely resembles the sound of the Ajira flight passing overhead - the last real sound that Jack heard before he died. The sound effect could be the actual 'sound' of Jack's transition to the flash-sideways world.

Notes

In "Happily Ever After", Desmond Hume transitioned between the original timeline and the flash-sideways timeline with the absence of the flash-sideways sound effect, in similar fashion to the way in which his story transitioned between present and past in "The Constant" without the flashback/flash-forward sound effect. However, the sound effect was used at the end of the episode, when he transitioned back into the sideways timeline, indicating that this last flash was a normal flash-sideways, and not consciousness-travel, as the main body of the episode was.